Slouching toward real estate

Author

Brian Boero

No.

71

Date

09/13/07

At the risk of seeming pretentious and simple at the same time, I submit that the poem Slouching Towards Bethlehem by W.B. Yeats captures the housing times better than anything you’ll read here or anywhere else.

Think about the rough beasts recently shaken from their decade-long slumber now making their way to the heart of our industry.

—

Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;Surely the Second Coming is at hand.The Second Coming! Hardly are those words outWhen a vast image out of Spritus MundiTroubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,Is moving its slow thighs, while all about itReel shadows of the indignant desert birds.The darkness drops again; but now I knowThat twenty centuries of stony sleepwere vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?